None of those get you closer to tenure I guess... There used to be research engineers in 'good' labs, friend of mine was. They'd take your software weekly, clea

None of those get you closer to tenure I guess... There used to be research engineers in 'good' labs, friend of mine was. They'd take your software weekly, clean and slice it, help you write tests, connect you with other colleagues or orgs, show you how you could achieve 30x perf when needed, would help you make your shit distributed, would get budget for CI and stuff. That was a dream job for me, for some time, since I'd been mentored by a demi-god of non-destructive-control (radiography, ultrasound...) and radioprotection research that was also a C++-expert sw engineer who had the most beautiful and clean/clear/modular/malleable codebase I've ever seen, and I saw the yuge potential of somewhat even passable sw engineering, especially when I understood his software was used in so many different operational contexts and also advanced research projects without his input, and his colleagues' sw were just toys, toys and more toys. I don't see that many job posts doing this anymore. And even then it's just not valued that much.